Podcast #29a: Tony Palmer Part 1 – Travels With Leonard Cohen

MusicFilmWeb: See It Loud

Tweet

Editor’s note: With the very belated theatrical release in January of the storied 1974 Leonard Cohen tour documentary Bird on a Wire, we’re reposting our 2011 interview with the great music-film maker Tony Palmer on the doc’s tortured history and glorious rebirth.

Since film sidetracked him from an academic career in the 1960s, Tony Palmer has been responsible for some of the most incisive and acclaimed music films of the last 50 years, ranging in subject from classical giants to rock gods to opera divas to, in the monumental 1976 BBC series All You Need Is Love, the entire history to date of popular music.

After touching on Palmer’s work in See It Loud #11, we met up with the man himself last week at the inaugural Sound+Vision music film festival in Sligo, Ireland, where he presented two of his films: Rory Gallagher – Irish Tour ’74, which captures the incendiary blues-rock guitarist in his prime in his native land, and Bird on a Wire, an intimate, long-lost chronicle of Leonard Cohen’s 1972 European tour that re-emerged late last year after a painstaking restoration.

The extraordinary tale of how Palmer made, lost, rediscovered, and reconstructed Bird on a Wire is the primary subject of this first half of our two-part podcast with the esteemed filmmaker. In part two, to be posted tomorrow, he discusses some of his rock-related and classical work as well as shopping with Stanley Kubrick and lunching with John Lennon.

The opening music by Los Musicos de Jose comes from Mevio’s Music Alley; the closing of Leonard Cohen live is used with the kind permission of Tony Palmer. Copious thanks are due to Colin McKeown of Sound+Vision and Cinema North West, Lara Byrne at Sligo arts center The Model, and Niall Flynn and the crew at Sligeach Films, to whom we owe the better than usual sound quality.

Movies in this one:

Bird on a Wire

All You Need Is Love

Maria Callas

Margot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hyd_ygJviQ

Tweet